My dissertation is about scientific explanations. I focus on how cognitive neuroscientists explain phenomena such as memory and language processing. While I am generally sympathetic to the view that scientists search for the neural mechanisms underlying these phenomena, and that they do so by employing systematic interventions, I argue, that the mechanist-interventionist picture suffers from conceptual challenges. I suggest a way to meet these, but even so the picture remains incomplete. There is much more to experimental manipulations than interventions into some factor X with respect to another factor Y. Examining cases from experimental research practice I distinguish intervention-based from other experimental strategies. This work provides the starting point for a new era in philosophy of science taking experimental practice at face value.

November 2010MSc. in Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UKdissertation title: The What and Where of Sign Languagesupervision: Eleni Orfanidou (DCAL, London), Bencie Woll (DCAL, London)

September 2009BSc. in Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Germanydissertation title: What is Cognition?supervision: Sven Walter (Osnabrück), Carl Craver (St. Louis)